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When Bob Dylan arrived in New York City on January 24, 1961, “it was dead-on winter,” he later recalled. “The cold was brutal, and every artery of the city was snow-packed. … It wasn’t money or love that I was looking for. I had a heightened sense of awareness, was set in my ways, impractical and a visionary to boot. My mind was strong like a trap, and I didn’t need any guarantee of validity. I didn’t know a single soul in this dark, freezing metropolis, but that was all about to change—and quick.”
What is now a historical event, as detailed by Dylan in his 2004 memoir, Chronicles, was once just the beginning of a journey of self-discovery. The artist who would eventually become the voice of a generation was then a 19-year-old college dropout bored with the Midwest and intrigued by the folk music coming out of Lower Manhattan’s Greenwich Village.
Dylan made his New York debut on his first night in the city, playing the harmonica at Café Wha?, a club he described as “a subterranean cavern, liquorless, ill lit, low ceiling, like a wide dining hall with chairs and tables.” A few days later, he went to visit his idol, folk legend Woody Guthrie, who was bedridden with Huntington’s disease at a New Jersey hospital. Dylan sang some of Guthrie’s own songs for the older artist. From there, he charted his own course forward in the music industry.
These early years of Dylan’s career are the focus of A Complete Unknown, a new film from director James Mangold. Starring Timothée Chalamet as Dylan, the movie takes viewers back to the early 1960s, a time when Dylan was not the grizzled, 83-year-old rock veteran he is today, but simply a young man trying to find his place in the world. As Chalamet remarks in the film’s trailer, “People make up their past. … They remember what they want. They forget the rest.”
Here’s what you need to know about the real history behind A Complete Unknown, as well as the life and legend of Dylan, ahead of the film’s release in theaters on December 25.
The inspiration behind A Complete Unknown
Based on cultural historian Elijah Wald’s 2015 book, Dylan Goes Electric! Newport, Seeger, Dylan and the Night That Split the Sixties, the 141-minute film follows the singer-songwriter from his arrival in New York City in 1961 to his controversial performance at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival. Chalamet leads an ensemble cast playing a “who’s who” of 1960s notables, including Edward Norton as Pete Seeger, Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez and Boyd Holbrook as Johnny Cash. Elle Fanning stars as Sylvie Russo, a stand-in for Dylan’s real-life girlfriend Suze Rotolo.
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Mangold based his film on history but was mostly concerned with capturing the essence of the era. “It’s not really a Bob Dylan biopic,” the director told the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast last year. “It’s a kind of ensemble piece about this moment in time in the early ’60s in New York … and this wanderer who comes in from Minnesota with a fresh name and a fresh outlook on life [and] becomes a star.”
In sharp contrast to the 2007 film I’m Not There, which cast six different actors as Dylan’s various public personas, A Complete Unknown portrays Dylan solely as the newcomer referenced in its title. While Chalamet has prepared for his role for years, he shares Mangold’s sentiments about historical accuracy. “This is interpretive,” he said of his performance in an Apple Music interview. “This is not fact. This is not how it happened. This is a fable.”
Interestingly, Dylan, who served as an executive producer on the film, directly contributed to its fictionalization of his life, insisting on adding at least one inaccurate moment to the script. This isn’t the first time the artist has obfuscated accounts of his past: Both his memoir and a 2019 documentary directed by Martin Scorsese blur the line between fact and fantasy.
Bob Dylan’s early years
While Dylan’s arrival in New York marks the beginning of his legend, his life began in Minnesota. Born Robert Allen Zimmerman on May 24, 1941, he was raised in a middle-class Jewish family in the small town of Hibbing.
Coming of age in the aftermath of World War II, Dylan enjoyed a peaceful childhood that allowed him to explore his creative interests. Enraptured by the rock ’n’ roll, country and R&B music he listened to on the radio, he got his start as a performer playing piano and guitar in a series of high school rock bands. The inscription on his 1959 yearbook picture signaled his artistic ambitions: “to join Little Richard.”
Dylan moved to Minneapolis in September 1959 to study at the University of Minnesota. He started going by “Bob Dylan” and shifted to folk music as he played gigs at coffeehouses across the Twin Cities. As Dylan later put it, “I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.”
Though Dylan didn’t stay in Minneapolis for long, dropping out of college after finishing his first year, he used that time to expand his listening—he was particularly taken by the folk stylings of Guthrie and Ramblin’ Jack Elliott—and cultivate his skills as a performer. As Wald writes in Dylan Goes Electric, “He heard hundreds of singers and songs, picked up anything that interested him, retained what he could use, and moved on. … He was quicker than most, was particularly adept and insistent about getting in front of audiences, and had an unusual knack for recognizing styles and material that suited his talents.”
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Feeling he had outgrown the Midwest, Dylan hitched a ride east to meet Guthrie and continue pushing forward as an artist. “He’s chasing that myth of somebody who thought [they] could make music that wasn’t just traditional folk music,” says Sean Latham, a literary scholar and the director of the University of Tulsa Institute for Bob Dylan Studies. “[He’s] not just trying to recreate the sounds of Appalachia, but [rather] use the mythic and musical building blocks of American folk music in order to make it immediately and tellingly reverent.”
How Bob Dylan developed as an artist
“Folk music is leaving the imprint of its big country boots on the nightlife of New York in unparalleled fashion,” wrote critic Robert Shelton for the New York Times in November 1960. “There is a standardless jumble of performing styles and performers’ purposes. … But beneath it all, there is a deep core of creativity that represents one of the biggest contemporary booms in a popular art form.”
When Dylan moved to New York in 1961, he was in the right place at the right time. He’d arrived at the height of the American folk music revival, a movement dating back to the 1940s that saw artists of all stripes emulate, adapt and innovate upon traditional songs. Greenwich Village had emerged as its epicenter.
This was a rich musical environment for Dylan, and he surrounded himself with people who both inspired and were inspired by him. Dave Van Ronk, a Village mainstay known as the “Mayor of MacDougal Street,” took Dylan under his wing. Seeger also mentored him, linking him to an older generation of folk singers who prized the music’s traditional roots and links to leftist politics. Baez, whose fame initially eclipsed Dylan’s, was a close friend, musical collaborator and romantic partner. And Dylan’s girlfriend Rotolo was far more than just the cover girl of his second studio album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. An artist and activist with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Rotolo encouraged Dylan’s support for the nascent civil rights movement.
Together, the Village’s sounds, artists and venues made it far more than the sum of its parts. The neighborhood was part of a greater lineage of countercultural communities that fostered artistic creation—but to Dylan, it might as well have been the center of the world. “These are the spaces that are created by folks who feel that they’re different from others, or feel that they want to be different from others,” says John Troutman, a cultural historian and music curator at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History. “They’re really the spaces that suggested that songs and music could become truly transformational in society, that things didn’t have to stay the way they were, and that artists could play an important role in shaping the conditions of the world moving forward.”
At just 20 years old, Dylan was already “one of the most distinctive stylists to play in a Manhattan cabaret in months,” wrote Shelton for the Times on September 29, 1961. “When he works his guitar, harmonica or piano and composes new songs faster than he can remember them, there is no doubt he is bursting at the seams with talent.”
Dylan’s rise was meteoric. The oft-quoted Times piece led John Hammond, a talent scout and producer, to discover the young singer and sign him with Columbia Records. Dylan released his eponymous first album in March 1962. Three more followed over the next two and a half years.
“How many roads must a man walk down / Before you call him a man?” Dylan sang in “Blowin’ in the Wind,” a single from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan. He’d started his career by interpreting rural roots music, as many folk musicians of his day did, but excelled as a songwriter as he increasingly moved toward writing more of his own material. “I guess it happens to you by degrees,” he wrote in Chronicles. “It’s not like you see songs approaching and invite them in. It’s not that easy. … You have to know and understand something and then go past the vernacular.”
In Latham’s view, “Everything you can feel in the ’60s is feeding [Dylan’s] imagination. He’s not sitting down and studying [folk traditions] narrowly. … It’s that ability to conjoin stuff that distinguishes Dylan as a songwriter.” Troutman agrees, saying, “It’s that ability of his to assimilate so much and to be inspired and transformed through it that serves as a real catalyst for him to produce something new.”
Though Dylan is most often remembered for his songwriting, he viewed himself first as a performer and a musician. “Dylan was always writing songs for himself to perform, not for other people to perform,” Wald tells Smithsonian magazine. “I would say always, the writing was secondary to the performance. The writing was serving the performance rather than vice versa.”
In Dylan’s early years, “he did his best to sing like [Guthrie], or at least like somebody from Oklahoma or the rural South, and was always very rough and authentic-sounding,” Van Ronk wrote in his memoir. But it is impossible to attribute a singular performance style to Dylan, as he frequently changed it up throughout his career. As Dylan put it in a 1984 interview, “In a live show, it’s not all in the lyrics. It’s in the phrasing and the dynamics and the rhythm.”
The formative years of Dylan’s career took place in the 1960s, a decade that the artist chronicled and grappled with through his topical songs. He was sympathetic to causes that would become core concerns of the counterculture and the New Left: “Masters of War” evoked the horrors of Cold War militarism. “Talkin’ John Birch Paranoid Blues” ridiculed anti-communism. “The Times They Are A-Changin’” spoke for itself. Dylan performed at benefits for CORE, sang with Seeger at a voter registration rally sponsored by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and performed with Baez at the 1963 March on Washington.
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Yet Dylan remained deeply ambivalent about being absorbed into any kind of movement. While his topical songs are oft-remembered today, they were a relatively small part of his overall output, and he became less involved in activist causes as the 1960s went on. “He’s an artist. He’s not a politician,” says Latham. “He’s not trying to make sure his music produces a particular political outcome. Instead, he’s thinking like an artist does. Who are these people? How do they work? How do their minds work? And he wants to inhabit those minds.”
When Bob Dylan went electric
Dylan’s July 25, 1965, performance at the Newport Folk Festival was—and continues to be—many things: a myth that pits “traditional” folk music against “progressive” rock, a controversy based in larger concerns about the spirit of folk music and another step in Dylan’s artistic evolution. But the set, in which Dylan played the electric guitar and embraced rock ’n’ roll publicly, was more complicated than a morality play pitting backward folk purists against forward-looking rockers.
The festival, held annually in Newport, Rhode Island, since 1959, was primarily intended to promote traditional, rural and regional styles. It also bridged this music with more commercial fare. Artists like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary shared the stage with obscure rural musicians from across the United States in the event’s spirit of communalism.
Dylan had played at Newport before. In 1963, he closed out his set with an ensemble performance of “We Shall Overcome.” Calling better-known acts like Seeger and Peter, Paul and Mary to the stage, Dylan sang and linked arms with his peers in a testament to folk solidarity. This show of unity aimed to promote artists like Dylan and the Freedom Singers as new lights of the folk revival.
Things were different in 1965. Rock music’s popularity had skyrocketed in the wake of the British Invasion, and many folk devotees considered its commercialism to be a threat to their communal values. The new festivalgoers who flocked to Newport were less interested in rural styles than they were in celebrities like Dylan. In fact, many had come just for Dylan, whose latest album—featuring an electric backing band and just two protest songs—sounded properly like rock.
When Dylan performed an under-rehearsed, 35-minute set and switched out his acoustic guitar for an electric one, reactions were decidedly mixed. While electric instruments weren’t necessarily taboo at Newport, to some, they represented the creeping commercialism of rock. It didn’t help that Dylan’s guitar and his backing band’s instruments were amplified far louder than most listeners were used to. Still, though some in the audience booed him, whether for going electric or for the brevity of his set, many others cheered.
In any case, Dylan and the world he inhabited had certainly changed. Rock was on the rise, and the early ’60s were coming to an end. As Dylan asked of his disoriented Newport audience during “Like a Rolling Stone,” “How does it feel / To be on your own / With no direction home?”
While most retellings of the 1965 Newport set portray Dylan as a stand-in for “youth and the future” who leaves his hecklers “in the dying past,” according to Wald’s Dylan Goes Electric, the moment also marked a point when the singer turned his back on a community that truly believed in his art. “In this version,” Wald writes, “the Newport festivals were idealistic, communal gatherings, nurturing the growing counterculture … and the booing pilgrims were not rejecting that future; they were trying to protect it.” The multivalent meanings of Dylan “going electric” varied depending upon where one’s cultural loyalties laid.
As important as the Newport set was, it was but one performance, and there were many more still to come. “As an artist, what Dylan was thinking about [was] that artists need to create strong reactions, one way or the other,” says Troutman. “And if you’re doing that, then you’re doing something. … Gentle clapping at the end of a performance is good. It’s fine. But is it art? I don’t know.”
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After Newport, Dylan kept performing and writing new music, releasing two albums in one year and continuing his shift from folk to rock. In July 1966, he was reportedly injured in a motorcycle accident, leading him to largely retreat from public life for the rest of the decade. Though he continued to release albums and returned to touring in the 1970s, his 1960s were over.
Bob Dylan’s legacy
So, why should we still care about Dylan? While Dylan made his greatest impact on American culture in the 1960s, he has continued to release new music in the decades since. Fans can still see him perform during his Never Ending Tour, which started in 1988 and remains ongoing. In 2016, Dylan was (controversially) awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature “for having created new poetic expressions within the great American song tradition.”
“He remains [an] extraordinarily inspiring figure,” says Troutman. “There’s so much art that’s available at our fingertips today … and so we have many choices in search of inspiration for imagining a world better than ours, or for understanding how we can become a part of something bigger. Dylan laid the groundwork for finding a way for himself to also become part of something bigger, and for others who followed him to do the same.”
Latham, meanwhile, argues that Dylan should be understood as the “founder of a tradition that made us see pop music, especially American popular music, as a fundamental art form that’s every bit as important as film or the novel or poetry. That’s why Dylan matters. It’s because we owe so much of that understanding of pop music to him.”
Dylan himself perhaps put it best. As the artist wrote on a scrap of paper found in the Bob Dylan Archive, “I’d hate to think I was speaking for a generation. I’d like to think I was speaking for myself, too.”
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